How to reinvent franchising with tech and transparency

Many smart people refrain from making public promises—we at Dodo Pizza revere them.

Openness is a huge motivator: when a goal is public, failure is not an option. That’s why every summer, during the company’s annual meetup, Dodo Pizza’s managers go on stage and announce five key projects they commit to pull off within the next 12 months.

Dodo is probably one of the world’s most agile retail companies with more than $150M in system-wide sales. We update our plans every other month reacting to the changes inside and outside of the company. Some people think we’re crazy to run our business this way, but it works quite well for us. On the other hand, having these five big projects helps us stay on track and keep sight of the bigger picture.

In my previous post, I talked about our previous five projects that we finished recently. Here are the five new ones we set out to achieve in 2018/2019.

1. Breakthrough in delivery

We are a delivery company that has been neglecting delivery a bit lately (guilty as charged). Today, when customers in Russia place orders, they receive them in 35–40 minutes. A few years ago, this average might have looked impressive. Not anymore. So our goal is to reduce the average delivery speed to 27 minutes across the chain in Russia. We’ll rethink every part of our delivery system—from our IT that will employ sophisticated algorithms to assign orders to the drivers on to using different types of transports.

2. Smarter customization

Customization is not news in the pizza market—many companies allow their customers to build their own pies, and for some chains, this feature is the core of their concept. We want not only to catch up with the global leaders, but to bring customization to a new level. Simplify the interface, give customers smart tips on how to combine toppings so they will complement each other, and allow people to save and share their recipes online.

3. Personalized marketing

Thanks to Dodo IS, we have tons of data about our customers, and we’re only dipping our toes in the big warm pool of possibilities that these data provide. Right now our webpage looks the same for all of our customers. Are you a meat lover? A vegetarian? A family guy who orders a simple cheese pizza for his kids every weekend? The website doesn’t care. This has to change. We know how companies like Amazon use data to adapt their content to the needs of every customer—and we want Dodo Pizza to be one of these companies.

4. Durable pizzerias

This goal doesn’t sound sexy, but it’s a big challenge for us. In our early years, we had to count every ruble we were spending on our pizza shops. Cash was scarce. Our first objective was to survive. Nobody was thinking about building durable pizzerias that will look new even after years of work. Our new objective is to revamp our approach to design and construction work management and make sure that our pizza shops will stay in mint condition even ten years after opening. In the long run, it will cost our partners less.

5. Open ranking

At the end of last year, we launched our mobile app. Within just eight months, more than 2.3 million people downloaded it from the App Store and Google Play. It turned us into an e‑commerce company—in May, 38.6% of our sales came through the app. And we’re going  to build on this success. In a few months, our team will launch a new feature that will make it possible for our customers to rate their order through the app. This feature will give us constant feedback on our performance, and we’re going to make full use of it by making an open ranking of every pizza shop in the chain based on this feedback. So before placing an order, every customer will be able to see how this particular pizzeria is ranking and what other people think of it. Our team believes that this simple feature will serve as a powerful incentive for us to never forget about our primary goal: serving our customers.